Uninstall Programs to Free Up Storage Space

PCs & Laptops For Dummies

Programs can occupy a lot of storage on your PC's hard drive. You may have programs installed on your PC that fit that category, programs that you may not have run in a while. If so, feel free to remove those huge hogs from the primary storage device.

Here, you see the list of installed programs on a PC, as sorted by file size. Yes, all of them are games. And, if you no longer play a game, you can uninstall the program and free up gigabytes of storage space.

Large programs, sorted by size.

To view large programs installed on your PC, follow these steps:

Tap the Windows key.
Type programs.
Choose the top item from the search results: Programs and Features Control panel.
Click the Size column heading to sort the list of programs by their size. You may have to click the column heading twice so that the list is presented from largest to smallest.

To uninstall a program you no longer use, click to select the program and then click the Uninstall button that appears. Continue following the onscreen directions.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.